It rained.
All day, from before I got up until after I pulled over for the night.
I'd gone through this before so I had tried to be prepared. All my rain clothes were there in the tent, ready to wear in the morning so I wouldn't have to sit the day out in my tent any more. But there were still some things I lacked.
The journey was miserable without boots. As I drifted along, I saw a bridge over the river and decided to stop there to put on more layers of clothing. It was dry under there, so I could put on another jacket, a pair of gloves, and socks on my otherwise bare feet. Socks alone may not do much when you are sitting in a boat that is slowly filling with water, but the wet material is somewhat better than nothing at all.
As I changed two fishermen appeared, one on either side of the bridge. I struck up a brief conversation and continued on. If the rain really brings up more fish, I didn't notice, but sometimes I think sportsmen just love the misery as much as anything else.
I did notice that they were wearing boots.
Dark and light patches shifted about on the water as I floated on - some chemical or organism makes different areas of the water reflect differently in the rain. I studied these for quite a while, ascertaining that they really did move with the current, and were not mere reflections of objects on shore.
At the end of the day, a few "raindrops" drifted down slowly and erratically. If I wasn't ready for rain, I was surely not ready for the cold stuff.
Day 72 ended: 49*53.479N, 100*22.666W
Monday, October 13, 2008
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6 comments:
Dang, g, you're going to have to make like a duck and migrate Dixonward.
Chemotaxis, where our single-celled friends randomly change direction proportional to the concentration of food nutrients, is now one of my favorite metaphors for a group of people visiting a festival. They get more random and slow down when they are together, but alone go in more or less a straight line.
There doesn't seem to be an English-language Wikipedia page covering your journey, although oddly enough the German Wikipedia has been following you closely.
Question (procedural): what's your point of view on comments? Is this more like a conversation, or more like we're writing in the margins of a book, that just happens to be a Dickensonian serial with the occasional letters column?
Is this the kind of thing where sometimes you're just running a script that posts a post a day, and you're actually in a different place, actually advanced in position, the avante garde, and we're reading the mainstream news?
To answer John, he's about a month behind, and I feel like a mother hen clucking concern. It was cold last night. Darin saw that you made it to Thief River Falls this morning. I wish you had stayed longer, perhaps the winter. You could venture out again in April. Let us know if we can do anything to help. 218-874-2884
John:
I don't know that I have a specific idea on the purpose of comments on this blog, other than if people post comments and I can think of a relevant or useful response, I will do so. Since I rarely have Internet access, what happens is when I find a computer I upload the blogs to appear a day at a time in the future. Sometimes I have a lapse and so the posts here get further and further behind; there is currently about a 40-day buffer between real-life and the blog.
I also usually post a [LIVE] blog whenever I check in, which shows the current day-number of the trip. This is all a bit slow and awkward, but it seems preferable at least to just doing a huge dump of posts whenever I find a computer.
Hi Kev,
Well, excellent then. I'm very excited to see a plethora of comments. However, with the resulting phase difference, I suspect we'll be commenting for years after the journey;
not that there's anything wrong with that
John, don't play with my heart! I'm not in the German wikipedia!
YET.
My apologies, I thought this would clearly be the kind of meta-knowledge tall-tale instantaneously recognizable to people familiar with my fabricarious tendencies.
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